The balance of power is shifting.

CENTCOM and the Treasury Dept. have combined to affect (effect? I always mess it up) a tumultuous economic moonshot that just… might… work.

Most of the Cable News commentary missed it.

Views are my own and do not represent the U.S. Air Force or Department of Defense.

Move One: Admiral Cooper’s Statement

On August 27th, Admiral Brad Cooper, Commander of U.S. Central Command, stepped into a military public affairs studio, looked into the camera, and announced that the commercial shipping lanes of the Strait of Hormuz were officially cleared of Iranian sea mines.

The announcement accomplished four things:

1. It communicated a domestic win for President Trump’s administration.

2. It sent direct reassurance to Gulf partners who have been making billion-dollar oil-infrastructure decisions accelerated by wartime uncertainty.

3. It delivered a message to every war-risk insurance underwriter in the global market: The SoH is safe… (er).

4. And buried under all of that, it laid the legal predicate for what was about to happen next on Larak Island.

The CENTCOM commander set the table.

Also worth noting (and underreported), about two minutes into that speech, he mentioned that Navy SEALs, professional dive teams, and U.S. Air Force assets had spent months conducting this clearing operation. The Frogmen were swimming through a CRAZY threat environment to make this happen.

Move Two: Larak Island (The Hillbilly Front Porch)

Three days later, CENTCOM spokesman Tim Hawkins said the US military observed IRGC preparing to launch rockets carrying sea mines…

Which kinda sounds like something out of the Coyote vs. Acme movie. But it’s evidently a real thing…

CENTCOM’s target was Larak Island, which I can best describe as the hillbilly front porch of the bad neighborhood.

If you want to threaten any ship transiting the SoH, Larak is THE prime real estate.

CENTCOM was deliberate about the framing. This was a “limited, precise action against IRGC minelaying forces.” Not a resumption of broader strikes. That language matters because it’s the same SoH doctrine that Admiral Cooper’s August 27th announcement established: The US cleared the lanes, the US announced the lanes were clear, and anything that threatens to re-mine them is an imminent threat to internationally recognized shipping.

Move Three: The Retaliation

Iran’s response came within hours with a large, multi-location launch of ballistic missile salvos targeting Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan.

Evidently, all were intercepted.

The nerdy detail: the Kheibar Shekan (Persian for “castle breaker”), which is a legit cool name for a legitimately awful weapon, is an intermediate-range ballistic missile. Some variants include maneuvering warheads that are harder to intercept than the traditional high-arc ballistic trajectory a Patriot system is optimized against.

Here’s what’s missing from MSM coverage: what Iran did not strike. They did not target the UAE… or Kuwait… or Bahrain, where target density is higher and the probability of economic damage is greater.

There’s also a math problem for the IRGC. They only have so many advanced long-range ballistic missiles. The more they spend on symbolic salvos, the fewer options they have.

The 17 Million Barrels Problem

Here’s a filter to apply every time a cable news analyst opens their mouth about the Strait of Hormuz: if their entire argument for whether this conflict is succeeding or failing rests on getting back to 17 million barrels per day flowing through the strait itself, stop listening.

Pre-war throughput was indeed approximately 17 million barrels per day. What those headlines don’t mention is that Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline to Yanbu Port has been running at record throughput, and the UAE’s ADCOP pipeline, which terminates at Fujairah east of the SoH, is running the same gambit. Combined, roughly 30% of pre-war Gulf exports can bypass the strait at current capacity.

That’s not enough to make the strait fully irrelevant… Indeed, Yanbu still exits through the Red Sea via the Bab el-Mandeb strait, which the Houthis still hold at risk. But the 30% (ish) bypass capacity means that applying the 17 million barrels pre-war benchmark to tanker traffic through the strait is the wrong metric.

Parting Shot

The Strait of Hormuz has been the defining chokepoint of global oil trade forever and a day. What the last six months have been (looking beyond the noise) is a coordinated effort by the U.S. and its Gulf partners to break that dependency.

I made this point in a guest segment on Scott Ryfun’s show this morning:

The strategic cost of leaving Iran the SoH lever to pull whenever they want is simply too high for Americans, Europeans, Emiratis, and Saudis.

Removing the Strait of Hormuz as Iran’s primary strategic (pardon the expression) trump card would be a legacy move for any president who gets it done. That’s what’s actually at stake.

The views expressed here are Riley Blanton’s own and do not represent the U.S. Air Force or Department of Defense.

Further Sources

1. Gulf Tensions Trigger 50% Surge in War Risk Premiums — Breakbulk News, Mar. 1, 2026

2. Shipping traffic via Strait of Hormuz slips below 10-day average — BOE Report, Aug. 27, 2026

3. Strait of Hormuz Brief: 27 August, 2026 — Lloyd’s List Intelligence

4. U.S. says pipelines will make Strait of Hormuz irrelevant. Energy experts disagree — WVIA/NPR, Aug. 28, 2026

5. US strikes Iranian launchers in strait of Hormuz, sparking reprisal attack on airbases in Jordan — The Guardian, Aug. 30, 2026

Almost none of the cable news hot takes on Patriot/Thaad interceptors bother to distinguish between them, which is why the conversation around this issue is so bad.

Stockpile strategy is exactly what it sounds like.

Deterrence comes from what’s waiting in the wings, ready to transfer to whatever theater needs it.

Production strategy is World War II. The stockpile matters less than the factory’s ability to spin up on demand and at scale. Your strength is the replacement rate.

BTW, views here are my own and don’t represent the U.S. Air Force or the Department of Defense.

Russia is the clearest recent case study in the stockpile strategy failing in real time. They went into Ukraine with decades of Soviet-era inventory (artillery, armor, aircraft) and burned through it hoping to seize Kyiv in a few days. (They almost would have if Hostomel airport fell, but that’s a story for another time.) Their manufacturing base hasn’t been able to keep pace with the losses.

Russia’s state aircraft manufacturer, OAK, produced roughly 20 to 30 fighter aircraft a year from 2022 to 2024. Last year, OAK topped out at 55.

The US produces 240 to 250 fighters per year.

Merica.

On Russia’s armored vehicles: Oryx, which only counts visually confirmed losses from open-source imagery, estimated losses at roughly 14k. Ukraine’s General Staff claims over 32k.

Even the conservative estimate blows past what Russia’s industrial capacity. That’s the reason you’re seeing Russian troops show up to the front line in ATVs and motorbikes.

But this isn’t just a Russia story.

The US historically employed both strategies, deep stockpiles backed by an industrial base that can surge when it has to. And it’s done so faster than people remember.

Take the up-armored Humvee. In 2003, the U.S. was producing 15 to 30 of them a month. As IEDs started tearing through unarmored vehicles in Iraq, production climbed to 400 to 650 a month within two years. By 2005, roughly 22,000 were in the field.

The MRAP came along even faster. According to the Government Accountability Office, the program hit over 1,000 vehicles a month by the end of 2007. By 2012, the U.S. had built almost 28,000 of them (for $47 billion.) It’s one of the fastest acquisition-to-production ramps in modern defense history.

BUT

Big but…

A Humvee/MRAP is not the same as a Patriot or THAAD interceptor. Those systems require exquisite, difficult-to-replace components. Granted, war always drives a surge in innovation/output. But the pipeline for armor kits VS advanced air defense is not remotely comparable.

That’s the thesis of The Kill Chain, by Christian Brose, former staff director for Senator John McCain on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Brose wrote it in 2020, years before drone warfare went mainstream in Ukraine. His argument: the Pentagon spent decades optimizing a small number of exquisite, extremely expensive platforms (the F-35 is the textbook example) on the assumption that quality always beats quantity. Brose’s warning was that the logic collapses when an adversary can out-produce you with cheap, expendable, networked systems.

We’ve watched that prediction play out over the last few months. Shahed one-way attack drones mass-produced by Iran. Loitering munitions… Production capacity itself has become the strategic variable (and a primary target set).

Some nerdy numbers: The U.S. accounts for 43% of global arms exports between 2020 and 2024, per SIPRI

The US has a genuine edge in precision munitions and fifth-generation fighters. But it doesn’t settle the long-term strategic challenge in a protracted systems conflict.

Whether the US or China comes out ahead in a protracted fight comes down to fabrication capacity and supply chain speed/resilience.

Brose’s book is refreshingly nonpartisan on this point. The challenge is whether the institutions of US military production could change their strategy before a real-world conflict forced the issue. WE’re finding out right now, in real time.

MTFBWY,

-Riley

Sources

• Christian Brose, The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare (2020)

• SIPRI Arms Transfers Database, 2020–2024 (U.S. share of global arms exports)

• UN Statistics Division / Statista, “Manufacturing value added by country”, 2023–2024

• Oryx open-source loss tracker — “Attack On Europe: Documenting Russian Equipment Losses During The Russian Invasion Of Ukraine”, visually confirmed Russian equipment losses

• Ukrainian General Staff, combined tank and armored vehicle loss figures — official Facebook page (primary source; also aggregated at the Kyiv Independent’s Russian losses tag)

• U.S. Government Accountability Office, GAO-10-155T, “Defense Acquisitions: Rapid Acquisition of MRAP Vehicles”

• GlobalSecurity.org — “Up-Armored HMMWV” production data, 2003–2005

• Ryan McBeth, OSINT analysis, “Iran Changed China’s Taiwan Invasion Plans” (Aug. 2026)

  ---

Views expressed are my own and do not represent the U.S. Air Force or the Department of Defense.

And it might have started with Star Wars.

But not in the way you’re thinking…

I was interviewing a few weeks ago at Freedom Fest. I can best describe him as a guy who treats American politics as a multi-billion-dollar reality show where the winning contestant gets to tax you.

His thesis: America runs on two entertainment products, football and politics.

And there’s no better case study for what happens when the second one swallows up another element of culture than what happened to Star Wars fandom.

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I was in the trenches for this. I hosted the (second… ok maybe third) most popular Star Wars podcast on the internet for about ten years, back before political #discourse consumed fandom.

My early identity was formed in Star Wars fandom. And by the way I’ve also spent the better part of a decade as an Air Force intelligence officer. A big part of my job is knowing how information gets weaponized.

Tribal Epistemology

Epistemology is simply the study of how we know what we know.

Do you believe something is true, or do you actually know it’s true?

Tribal epistemology happens when you decide what’s true based on who is saying it. It’s less about the argument, just the team jersey. Red team or blue team. You’re not allowed independent thoughts anymore. You get handed your social media NPC script: what’s true, how you’re supposed to feel about whatever the hot-button topic is today.

This is a principle of information warfare. Belief is organized around tribal interest rather than reality. And it’s not a political phenomenon; it’s human nature.

But this is the engine underneath the modern outrage economy: the platforms reward emotional reaction to perceived grievance, and culture war content is a grievance factory.

If you want to see this play out in Star Wars specifically, it comes down to one movie: The Last Jedi.

2017 was the fault line.

The Rian Johnson Problem

One moment gets overlooked in most retellings of how bad this got, and I think it’s the real hinge moment. Rian Johnson caught a lot of heat for being combative with fans who criticized the film — dismissing a chunk of the audience as “man babies.” That line, landing in a moment when American politics was already at its most reactionary, permanently calcified him as a divisive figure.

What’s less discussed is a scene from The Director and the Jedi, the documentary covering the making of the film. Mid-production (before any of the fan backlash/controversy), Rian is checking Twitter at a table with his production team. He says he’s getting a “coordinated wave of tweets” from Russian-linked accounts, all begging him not to kill General Hux.

It’s weird.

Rian is engrossed by internet discourse about his movie that hasn’t come out yet.

So of course someone watching the backlash form gets defensive. But mocking a segment of Star Wars fandom doesn’t defend the storytelling. It shifts the conversation away from the film and onto the people reacting to the film.

Discourse about discourse.

And it’s the perfect example of the bubble Lucasfilm found itself in, where criticism itself got treated as evidence of bigotry.

The Grifter Business Model

There’s a tell in a certain kind of Star Wars content: a total inability to say anything positive about any Star Wars project since 2017. Every piece of SW content becomes a five-alarm culture war fire. It’s tribal posturing.

An outrage-flavored Big Mac.

Channels built entirely on eviscerating left-leaning identity politics in media have every incentive to keep going because there’s always another controversy. (There’s certainly no shortage of left-leaning identity politics) But what if there’s a decent/fun movie? That’s not content. Nobody’s clicking on “I thought The Odyssey fine”

Which it was.

Why I Left

I wrote a piece on my Substack years ago:

I’d spent years hosting the Star Wars Report podcast, doing live shows at Dragon Con and Star Wars Celebration. I was in the Force.net forums before social media existed.

I’m no Star Wars tourist.

So I was there when it stopped being fun. Eventually every conversation about Star Wars online required allegiance to one political side or the other before you were allowed an opinion.

Outrage-bait is the highest-engagement, lowest-effort fan content. The hotter the take, the morethe views. The incentive structure is to convert fandom into tribal NPCs, incapable of breaking with the dogmatic view of the culture war.

(See what I did there?)

I met my friend Aaron Goins in 2011 at Star Wars Fan Days in Texas. We went to Star Wars Celebrations and Comic Cons, hosting our podcasts for the better part of a decade. I FaceTimed him for this piece to ask him the simple question: what the hell happened?

His answer was simple: fandom got weird, everything went too online, and it stopped being “let people enjoy what they enjoy.” Fandom became a contest of who could pick apart whose opinion.

We don’t really chat about SW anymore.

When I got stationed in Korea, I needed something to talk to Aaron about that wasn’t SW, so I got into MLS soccer. Now most of our conversations are about a nerdy sports league most Americans don’t follow. And one of the few corners of culture that’s (mostly) escaped culture war politics.

MTFBWY

-Riley

Sources:

• Roberts, David. “Donald Trump and the Rise of Tribal Epistemology.” Vox, March 22, 2017. Origin of the term “tribal epistemology” and its working definition.

• Gulf News. “Star Wars Director Slams Trolls for Kelly Marie Tran Attack.” Rian Johnson’s “manbabies” comment.

• Kohn, Eric. “Rian Johnson: Russian Bots Targeted Star Wars: The Last Jedi to Save General Hux.” Gizmodo, March 13, 2018. The coordinated-tweet scene from The Director and the Jedi.

• Murray, Conor. “Ben Shapiro And Elon Musk Are Among Conservatives Split Over ‘The Odyssey.’” Forbes, July 21, 2026.

• Brady, W. J., McLoughlin, K., Doan, T. N., & Crockett, M. J. “How Social Learning Amplifies Moral Outrage Expression in Online Social Networks.” Science Advances, August 13, 2021. Platforms reward outrage.

• Gramlich, John, et al. “What Is America’s Sport? Far More Say Football Than Baseball.” Pew Research Center, February 5, 2024.

• Axios. “Americans Now Want to Read About Sports, Not Politics.”

But here’s the thing: he’s a career academic, and I take issue with some of his analysis… And that’s ok! You can learn from people you disagree with.

Pape’s argument, compressed: the MOU fell apart because the United States violated paragraph one and paragraph five, and Iran responded by striking commercial vessels. I also read the document. I know, crazy, right?

Listen to the full podcast:

Apple Podcasts

To understand why the MOU mattered, you need to understand what Iran did in the opening days of the conflict. Within the first 2 days of Operation Epic Fury, Iran moved to seize and mine the Strait of Hormuz as a deliberate strategic response to an air campaign the IRGC knew they could not match symmetrically. Before February 28th, 120 to 140 commercial vessels transited the strait every day. That traffic represented about 20 percent of global oil supply. Closing it was a form of economic coercion on a global scale, and it handed Tehran leverage that no air campaign could completely neutralize.

Here’s the honest reality of a large-scale air campaign: it can significantly degrade command and control networks, radar systems, ballistic missile launchers, and fuel production infrastructure. Those objectives are real, and they matter. What air power cannot feasibly do (and what real professionals have never claimed it could) is completely eliminate thousands of dispersed coastal defense missiles and drones, some sitting in warehouses, some hidden in caves, etc. It’s a nearly impossible targeting problem. Dismissing the air campaign for failing to accomplish something it was never designed to do is unfair. But it does mean that Iran entered the MOU negotiations still holding meaningful military and economic leverage.

By June, after roughly 110 days of active conflict and multiple rounds of negotiations, the Islamabad MOU was supposed to be the off-ramp. It lasted eleven days before the first tanker got hit.

On Paragraph One

Here’s the exact language from the MOU, as disclosed by a senior U.S. official and published in full on June 17th:

“The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran and their allies in the current war are signing this MOU to declare the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon, and undertake from now on not to initiate any war or any military operation against each other...”

The phrase that became the fault line: “and their allies in the current war.” Iran’s argument was that Israel, as a US ally in the conflict, was bound by the Lebanon ceasefire clause. When Israel conducted independent strikes in southern Lebanon in late June — continuing its clearing operations against Hezbollah rocket sites and tunnels south of the Litani River, as it had been doing for months — Tehran cited this as a US violation of paragraph one.

I understand Pape’s technical argument. The language is there. But I think it’s a stretch to call that a US violation… and here’s why.

Israel was not a signatory to this agreement. Neither was Hezbollah. Neither was Lebanon. The Islamabad MOU was a bilateral document between Washington and Tehran. Iran can (kinda) speak for Hezbollah because the IRGC Quds Force largely commands Hezbollah. The United States cannot compel Israel’s independent military decisions in the same way. And everyone at that negotiating table knew that. The “allies” language created an asymmetric obligation from the moment it was written: Iran signed on behalf of a proxy it controls; the US was being held responsible for the sovereign choices of a state it doesn’t control in the same way.

To call what happened in Lebanon a US violation of paragraph one is a defensible reading of a vague and poorly-drafted clause. It is not, I think, a fair characterization of what actually happened. The more honest framing is that paragraph one contained a structural defect from day one. By including Lebanon without getting Israel to the table, the drafters created a ready-made Iranian grievance that was always going to materialize. Whether it was genuinely a US violation or a pretext depends on a factual question about Israeli intent that we do not know. What I’m confident about is that it wasn’t the United States unilaterally choosing to break the agreement.

On Paragraph Five — Where the Deal Actually Died

This is the more important one, and it’s where I think the “US violated it” framing is most unfair.

Paragraph five reads:

“Upon the signing of this MOU, the Islamic Republic of Iran will make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels with no charge, for 60 days only, from the Persian Gulf to the Sea of Oman and vice versa... The Islamic Republic of Iran will conduct dialog with the Sultanate of Oman to define the future administration and maritime services in the Strait of Hormuz in discussion with other Persian Gulf littoral states in line with the applicable international law and the sovereign rights of coastal states of the Strait of Hormuz.”

What Iran did with this paragraph in the days following the MOU’s signing was ludicrous. The IRGC announced that the only “authorized route” through the strait was the northern corridor through Iranian territorial waters. They proposed tolls of more than a million dollars per vessel. And they warned that ships not complying with IRGC instructions would be subject to attack.

Their justification: the phrase “60 days only, with no charge” means the free passage obligation expires after 60 days, after which Iran controls everything. The “sovereign rights of coastal states” language means Iran has the right to define routing, access, and pricing.

This is simply not what paragraph five said.

More fundamentally: the Strait of Hormuz is an international strait under maritime law. Commercial vessels have the right of transit passage through international straits. No bilateral agreement between two countries should unilaterally create a new legal regime for a waterway that affects 20 percent of global oil supply and dozens of non-party states.

When the US and CENTCOM accompanied commercial vessels to enforce basic transit rights, Iran treated it as a violation of the agreement. But the US wasn’t violating paragraph five; it was enforcing international maritime law. Two parties signed the same document and read two completely different agreements. Within eleven days, the first tanker got hit. Then the ceasefire collapsed. Then, on July 7th, the US airstrikes resumed.

Why Getting This Right Matters Today

We are on Day 148. Last night was the first night without announced US strikes since July 11. The Houthis recently fired missiles at Yanbu and Jazan, Saudi Aramco infrastructure on the Red Sea, which has become the primary bypass route for Saudi oil that can no longer transit Hormuz. Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline is maxed out at 7 million barrels per day. The UAE’s Habshan-Fujairah pipeline is running at capacity. Those two pipelines are the reason global oil markets haven’t collapsed.

I think Pape makes a compelling argument about the escalation trap. But his framing that the United States broke this deal papers over an adversary that moved almost immediately to use the ambiguity in paragraph five to assert a claim over the Strait of Hormuz that no reasonable reading of the MOU actually supports.

The Watchtower Intel podcast episode accompanying this analysis, including my segment with Scott Ryfun’s show on July 24th, is available wherever you listen. The Diary of a CEO interview with Robert Pape is here — watch it!

The views expressed are my own and do not represent the U.S. Air Force or the Department of Defense.

Iran is threatening Jordan’s only Red Sea port.

This is not isolated. It is the third major Center of Gravity struck or threatened in Jordan in 72 hours.

The Sequence

On July 16, open-source reporting indicated Iranian forces struck MSAB, Muwaffaq Salti Air Base. (More on that below) What followed yesterday was more revealing: Iranian state media released high-resolution satellite imagery of a destroyed aircraft shelter:

This is what the intelligence community calls battle damage assessment, confirmation imagery used to validate strike effectiveness. When an adversary releases it publicly, it becomes an information operation. Iran is signaling their capabilities to every government in the Gulf that hosts American forces.

On July 17, IRGC ballistic missiles and drones struck MSAB again. Two U.S. service members were killed. One remains missing. Four others were evacuated for medical treatment. These are the first American military fatalities from Iranian fire since March,

On July 19, this morning, the Israeli military says it detected the launch of ballistic missiles from Iran toward the southern Jordanian city of Aqaba.

What Iran Is Actually Doing

Aqaba is not a military target in the conventional sense. It is Jordan’s economic lifeline, its only seaport and its Red Sea access point and connection to global shipping lanes that have already been throttled by Houthi operations in the Bab al-Mandab Strait. Threatening Aqaba simultaneously with MSAB is coercion applied across two domains at once: degrade Jordan’s military infrastructure, then threaten its economy. The goal is to change Amman’s political calculus about the cost of hosting U.S. forces and coordinating air defense with Israel.

Jordan’s air defense performance over the past two years has been exceptional. Amman has intercepted Iranian projectiles at scale, including 10 missiles in a single night this week, its highest count of the current cycle. That capability is squarely in the direct flight corridor between Iran and Israel. From Tehran’s perspective, Jordan is not a peripheral problem. It is an obstacle. The Iranian operation is an attempt to degrade either Jordan’s capability or Jordan’s willingness to remain in the fight.

The Language Tell

U.S. Central Command posted at 6:17 PM on July 18 that new airstrikes against Iran were underway, designed to “further degrade Iran’s ability to threaten commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and swiftly punish Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps forces who launched attacks against American service members in Jordan last night.”

That word — punish — is a shift in operational language from CENTCOM.

The military lexicon for campaign objectives is typically “degrade, deny, disrupt, destroy, defeat.” “Punish” is retributive language.

The IRGC has now absorbed seven or more rounds of U.S. airstrikes and expanded its target set. It has escalated its public messaging and released satellite imagery of the American bases impacted.

What Aqaba Signals Next

The threat to Aqaba, the airport, and the seaport simultaneously carries a specific logic. A strike on civilian transit infrastructure in a city that is not a traditional military target crosses a threshold Jordan will have to respond to politically. It also signals that Iran is willing to absorb the international optics cost of targeting civilian infrastructure, which suggests confidence — or desperation — about the sustainability of the current trajectory.

Watch for two things: whether Aqaba materializes as a significant Iranian target in the next 24-48 hours, and whether Jordan’s air defense posture shifts in response to the coercive pressure. If Amman begins pulling back cooperation, Iran will have achieved its objective.

The front has moved. Jordan is no longer a staging area. It is a target.

(Views expressed are my own and do not represent the U.S. Air Force or the Department of Defense.)

Sources:

• Two US service members killed, one missing following Iranian strikes in Jordan — CNN

• U.S. Embassy Amman Security Alert, July 19, 2026 — @USEmbassyJordan

• U.S. Central Command — @CENTCOM

• Iran War 2026 — Day 141 Update — GlobalSecurity.org

• OSINTdefender — @sentdefender

• MenchOsint — @MenchOsint

Listen to the Podcast

There’s a moment in my conversation with Justin where he pointed out how much Iranian information operations on social media have evolved. The day before the funeral ceremonies began, when the Islamic world would watch state television coverage of the burial of the Ayatollah, whose office places him as the vicegerent of God on earth, Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf was on X, trolling the American food stamp program.

Not the martyred Imam.

Not the “Great Satan.”

SNAP benefits.

It was a direct shot at President Trump, who had made comments about Iran’s economic struggles and floated the idea of eventually supplying Iran with American food commodities. Ghalibaf’s response: “Imagine having forty-something million of your own citizens on food stamps and calling another nation hungry.”

Justin’s read on the broader pattern: “I go to people like you, and I go to people like , and I look for Iranian sources, and I’m like — how much of this is them glomming on to things? In the way that the Russians understood on Facebook. Let’s find these wedge issues and let’s blow them up. Or are these being fed? Are these little things that are then being blown up by these outside forces?”

Justin is asking the right question. Effective influence operations do not always invent falsehoods. Often, they take something real, strip away its context, and amplify it until it becomes tribal ammunition. While I can’t peer into the man’s soul, I think it’s safe to say Ghalibaf probably doesn’t care about American poverty. He's tweeting about SNAP because he knows which wounds to pour salt into.

In short, is the SNAP issue reflective of a genuine crisis or simply tribal politics exploited in the information space? It’s the kind of question central to Justin’s work.

I’ve been a longtime listener of Politics Politics Politics, and Justin’s approach is deceptively simple: politics, at its core, is about who pushes the button in the voting booth. Not the culture war du jour. The mechanics. Who votes, and why they vote.

Balls and strikes.

His political awakening, he told me, came after the 2000 election. He grew up in South Florida during the time of the hanging chad controversy and the Clinton scandals.

But Bill Clinton, while many things… was the proverbial political duck. Despite the scandals and impeachment, he maintained high job approval ratings during his second term, presiding over a booming economy and demonstrating the unflappable charm of a web-footed water bird unfazed by the controversies rolling off its feathery dorsal.

Objective is the operative word in Justin’s framework. And I want to spend a minute on it because I think it’s the most misunderstood thing about what he and the rare political animals like him do.

People assume political journalists are objective when they treat both sides equally. That’s not objectivity; that’s symmetry. Justin’s version is something closer to what an intelligence analyst tries to do: identify what is actually happening, in terms of measurable outcomes and key indicators, and resist the gravitational pull toward the particular answer he wants.

He told me his reason for avoiding partisanship is explicitly selfish: “I don’t want to be wrong. And I know that the way that I would be wrong is if I was rooting for somebody.”

It’s a rare discipline in political media.

That discipline matters more now than ever. Justin put it plainly:

This is the architecture of modern politics, not just the content but the fundraising model and the engagement algorithm; all of it is biased towards intensity. The most useful voter to a campaign is an unquestioning true believer. So that’s what the system produces.

Justin’s other observation was grim: we don’t really have anywhere else to go. America, he argued, runs on two entertainment destinations: football and politics. Everything else — movies, art, music — is diminished. “There’s not a lot of release valve aside from football.” So people who might have spent their passion writing a 4,000-word forum post about Lord of the Rings are writing a 400-word Facebook screed about *insert hated political figure here instead. The same psychological energy, the same tribal intensity, is redirected into politics.

I’ve spent a lot of my professional life studying how influence works, how adversaries (and algorithms) shape what people believe is true. The broad term is information warfare. But the manipulation tactics are similar to what Justin describes: find the person’s identity, their tribe, their fear, their grievance… and then pull. The lever is the same whether you’re a foreign intelligence service running a social media operation or a super PAC running a targeted ad.

That’s what made the Ghalibaf SNAP comments so clarifying. God’s funeral is a geopolitical event. SNAP benefits are a domestic wedge. The operational goal is to increase the fractures in American civil society, to flood the zone with information that increases mutual distrust, that confirms existing grievances, that keeps people embedded in the partisan ecosystem rather than stepping outside it to… touch grass, as the kids say.

In this week’s episode you’ll hear:

The real reason the Iran ceasefire keeps falling apart — and why it’s as much a theological crisis as a military one. (This builds on the piece I already published on Substack last week, so if you’ve read that, you’ll have the context. If not, the episode stands on its own.)

The full conversation with Justin Robert Young — his origin story and his read on where political media is going next.

And finally — a behind-the-scenes look at where Watchtower Intel stands a few months in.

Also here’s a fun picture of Justin and me from Dragon Con like 12 years ago:

[Podcast also available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you listen.]

MTFBWY

-Riley

The views expressed here are my own and do not represent the U.S. Air Force or the Department of War.

Quick recap: the last few months moved fast, and I don’t think the headlines connected the dots.

Khamenei was killed in February, in the opening strikes of the U.S.-Israeli campaign. Iran didn’t bury him until today (as I’m writing this), five months later. Last month, the U.S. and Iran signed a Memorandum of Understanding. It got reported as a ceasefire, close enough to a peace deal that most people stopped paying attention.

It’s more complicated. (Shocking, I know)

A US official told the Wall Street Journal on July 7 that Iran has restored some military capabilities around the Strait of Hormuz since the April 7 “ceasefire” and also moved small, portable radars to replace fixed radar sites destroyed during the war. This same official also stated Iran dug out or repaired hundreds of missiles and launchers damaged or buried in US strikes and now has access to more than half of its pre-war missile and launcher stockpile.” (ISW)

Then, on the night of July 8, U.S. forces hit roughly ninety Iranian targets, Bushehr, Chabahar, Bandar Abbas, Sirik in response to Iranian attacks on commercial tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran hit back at U.S. installations in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar.

The next day, at a NATO summit in Ankara, the President went further. He mused about the possibility of seizing Kharg Island. This terminal handles most of Iran’s oil exports, and potentially striking the country’s desalination plants, which are how Iran provides much of its potable water.

That’s where we are: a contested regime and a U.S. president publicly naming targets that escalate further than anything the military has targeted to date.

CENTCOM’s intent, as stated, was to “degrade Iran’s ability to attack commercial shipping.” That is a doctrinally scoped phrasing. It maps to a clear legal authority: freedom of navigation.

The president called the regime “cuckoo” and “scum” and told the room, “we said ‘go do your funeral stuff,’ and instead of that, they start shooting rockets at ships.”

I can best describe this as… strategic asymmetry. CENTCOM’s authorized language “degrade” is scoped to FoN. Kharg Island and desalination plants are not FoN targets. They are regime-coercion targets.

God is Dead

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in the opening U.S.-Israeli strikes in February. He was buried yesterday (as I write this) at the Shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad, Shia Islam’s holiest site in Iran, and the resting place of the eighth Imam.

The Islamic Republic’s constitutional design, Vilayat-e Faqih, rule of the jurist — places the Supreme Leader as the final religious, judicial, and military authority. That chair has been empty for five months. During funeral week, hard-line factions physically attacked President Masoud Pezeshkian and the Iranian foreign minister over their engagement with the M.O.U. American news commentary keeps analyzing “Iran” as if it is a unitary actor with a strategy.

It has not been one since February.

Islamic tradition calls for the prompt burial of the deceased. So why the delay?

It’s simple. This departure from Islamic tradition was an orchestrated event designed to provide maximum advantage in the information space. Not yours. I doubt your social media “algo” is pushing images from the funeral, but that’s not the case in much of the Islamic world.

This is the death of God.

And there is no clear (ambulatory) heir.

Every ceasefire signed by an Iranian official right now is signed by a faction, not a state. Every clause depends on an enforcement mechanism that the regime does not have control over. The M.O.U.’s fragility is an artifact of a Supreme Leader-shaped hole in a regime whose heir is MIA.

Now stack the two. On one hand, a U.S. doctrinal category change from freedom-of-navigation to regime-coercion, communicated at NATO and not yet operationalized. On the other hand, an adversary regime with no final authority available to accept, enforce, or refuse a de-escalation.

So What

Signal to watch for:

• Changes in official U.S. releases. If CENTCOM moves from “degrade” to “compel,” “dismantle,” or “coerce,” that is the doctrinal shift landing in writing.

• Any incident involving Kharg, oil-export infrastructure, or desalination capacity. Watch what actually gets struck, not what gets threatened.

Noise to discount:

• Cable segments on “war powers” as a partisan bit. It is a real constitutional argument; it is also not going to meaningfully factor into the current scope of the conflict.

• And any headline that reads “Iran said.” Iran is not one voice right now.

  ---

NOTE: As of this morning, Qatari mediators are scrambling to salvage the truce after the last two days of U.S. strikes hitting now more than 170 targets. President Trump has already called the ceasefire 'over'; Tehran is threatening to widen its retaliation to more U.S. facilities in the region.

We’ll keep the watch.

-Riley

Views expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Air Force or Department of Defense.

He works in the States, so he didn't need convincing to come, but he'd been watching the World Cup reaction videos with the rest of the world. You know the ones: Japanese fans taking their first bite of Texas barbecue, Europeans losing their minds inside a Buc-ee's, the Tartan Army singing in a Boston pub.

He told me what surprised him most wasn't so much the social media videos themselves. It was how caught off guard Americans were by these enthusiastic foreign football fans. "You lot never hear good things about yourselves," he said. "The media just doesn't show it."

Let me back up.

The 2026 World Cup was carrying more media baggage than almost any American sporting event before. For months before the opening match, a narrative infrastructure was being constructed. Online petitions. Human Rights Watch advisories. The Dutch gathered 174,000 signatures on a boycott petition. A German superfan decided to stay home, telling CNN he felt the US was a place where ICE agents were “pulling people from the streets just because they look foreign.” Human rights organizations issued a formal travel advisory warning of “risk of serious rights violations” to anyone who showed up.

The message, sustained across months of coverage, was consistent: America is not safe. America is not welcoming. And people should think twice before coming here.

Then people came here anyway. And started filming.

A German fan named Freddy went viral documenting his road trip through the American South—marveling at the sheer size of college football stadiums and the hospitality at Waffle House at 1 a.m. He got invited to the White House. He met astronauts at NASA.

A Japanese visitor took his first bite of Texas barbecue and tasted something close to a religious experience. A Swedish fan named Elsa discovered ranch dressing at an Indianapolis diner and immediately demanded its immediate export to Europe.

The Tartan Army showed up to Fenway Park for Scottish Heritage Night at a Red Sox game (a sport they didn’t really understand), marched down to the stadium en masse, in kilts, playing bagpipes, and brought European soccer singing culture to Major League Baseball. One Scottish fan told reporters the welcome from Boston had been “fantastic” and that the city had taken them into their hearts. The Red Sox lost. Nobody cared.

A British entrepreneur who moved to California the previous year told ABC News: “A lot of people say Americans are fake, and I just don’t think that’s true. I think Americans are just really nice and friendly.”

And then the truth bomb: “I think Americans, it’s refreshing to them to hear good things. They hear a lot of bad at the moment.”

Here is what’s actually happening: a sustained, multi-year information operation has been running against American self-perception. Not necessarily an operation from a foreign adversary (though they have been happy to amplify it), an operation running through social media, pundits, and the current political incentive structure, all feeding the same thesis: that America is broken, embarrassing, dangerous, and in decline.

The brilliance of this IO campaign is that you don’t need to manufacture lies out of thin air. You need to select true things, strip them of context, amplify them relentlessly, and make the resulting perception feel true. A locked shampoo bottle in a CVS becomes evidence of civilizational collapse. All ICE enforcement action becomes proof that the entire country is a police state. A political disagreement about immigration policy becomes a reason people are afraid to visit.

Worth noting: manufactured American doomerism is not a partisan product. It moves units on both sides of the aisle. I'm singling out Tucker Carlson not because he's the only one running this play, but he is one of the few running it while taking research trips to Bernie Sanders' preferred honeymoon destination.

In February 2024, Tucker flew to Moscow to interview Vladimir Putin. The interview itself was so soft that even Putin found Carlson’s questioning lame. But the content that actually impacted the information space was what Tucker produced around the interview: travelogue segments extolling Russian civilization, filmed with the aesthetic of a tourism ad.

He went to a Moscow grocery store, guessed his cart of food would cost around $400, and it came in at $104. “Coming to a Russian grocery store,” he said on camera, “the ‘heart of evil,’ and seeing what things cost and how they live, it will radicalize you against our leaders.”

Let’s get real for a second: those cheap supermarket prices were a mirage sustained by government subsidies. The economy funding those subsidized prices is bleeding out to pay for a war Carlson had spent years arguing America had no business opposing.

Meanwhile, leaked Kremlin memos in the week following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine contained explicit instructions for Russian state media to use Carlson’s content as much as possible. Russian state television ran his clips regularly because he was doing their job better than they could.

Senator Thom Tillis put it well: “The Soviets had a term for people like Tucker: useful idiots.”

Many claim to love America and simultaneously serve the information interests of a government whose strategic objective is to make Americans believe their country is broken. The grift is this: catastrophism about America is profitable. The audience for the American decline decline narative is enormous and loyal. You can monetize the outrage at scale and call it patriotism.

This brings me to Colorado.

I was at the Air Force Academy for Space Cowboys with Altitude Live, an initiative bringing military creators to the America 250 events across the country. Space Cowboys was nuts. An outdoor festival, PBR rodeo, and Tim McGraw concert. It doesn’t get much more #AMERICA. If you'd seen that crowd in a social media clip, you might have rolled your eyes. Flags, country music, PBR, the whole thing. In person, it felt like a real community.

On the way to and from the event, airports were full of people in soccer jerseys. Every national flag you could think of. The military creators I was working with came from all over, different backgrounds, different parts of the country. Didn’t matter. We found a sports bar and watched the US destroy Australia. (Cue the John Denver music)

It was awesome.

Back to the Scotsman at Hartsfield-Jackson.

He’d been sold a story. A story that months of pre-tournament coverage had crafted. The narrative of America as dangerous, unwelcoming, and in terminal decline had taken root. It has institutional backing, social media amplification, and a roster of well-compensated commentators keeping it alive. What it cannot overcome is a Japanese kid taking his first bite of Texas barbecue. A Swede discovering ranch dressing or The Tartan Army filling a Boston pub until last call.

These social media clips aren’t produced or pre-coordinated. Nobody was issued talking points. It’s just people encountering ordinary American life and being genuinely delighted by it. And that counters the catastrophism narrative better than any Substack think piece. (see what I did there?)

MTFBWY and GO TEAM USA

-Riley

Views expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Air Force or Department of Defense.

Apparently, a 30-year-old YouTuber from Los Angeles gets this concept more than a 300-franchise Lego-adjacent corporation. This is the Reckless Ben story. And if you haven’t seen the videos, it be crazy; here’s the compressed version.

The Setup

Ed Mansell is 83 years old. Since the ‘90s, he’s been building a Star Wars Lego collection. 780+ sealed sets, 1,200+ minifigures, estimated somewhere between $60,000 and $200,000, depending on who’s doing the estimating. His son Brian consigned the collection to a Bricks and Minifigs franchise location in Kaiser, Oregon.

Then the store changes hands in November 2024. New owners — Brandon Best and Joshua Johnson — claim no knowledge of the consignment agreement. Payments stop. When Brian tries to terminate the arrangement and retrieve his father’s collection, the new owners counter with an offer: issue a public apology, and maybe they’ll discuss returning the Star Wars merch.

Brian declines. They keep the Legos.

Enter Benjamin Snyder.

The Campaign

Reckless Ben (appropriately named) makes a 1:40-minute documentary that goes to levels of insanity that feel absurd to even write about. Ben drives all the way to the Oregon store to question the new manager. He shows up at corporate headquarters in Utah to confront the CEO. He is theatrical, confrontational, and completely uninterested in settling for anything short of getting Brian’s Legos back. He builds a fake rival business. (We Steal From Old People) He organizes a raffle to test the State of Oregon's criminal code. He posts a sign outside the franchise owner’s home. He gets arrested by a small-town SWAT team at his Airbnb in Utah on misdemeanor charges, flees to Mexico, and keeps posting.

Yes.

You read all that right…

Here’s what every institution in this story missed: they saw Ben as a content creator chasing clicks. But Ben wasn’t the threat.

The story was.

A Note: The institutions in this story lost plot. They lost sight of what actually matters. That’s what great stories tell us, and it’s my debut book, Great Escape, is about. If you want to be the first to know when preorders open, plus get exclusive bonus content from me and my co-author , head to GreatEscapeBook.com.

Join the Waitlist

Why the Story Won

No cease-and-desist letter makes you feel something. Ben’s story did what corporate crisis PR cannot: it worked on a human level.

An old man. A Lifelong collection. A big company that inexplicably refuses to give it back.

You don’t need to understand Oregon franchise law or the specifics of the consignment agreement. Because we all know what it feels like to lose something you love. And it’s Star Wars Legos. The greatest Star Wars toys ever made.

I’ll be honest about the nuance here, because Ben’s version of events was probably cleaner than the actual messy legal reality. The consignment arrangement’s legitimacy under the Bricks and Minifigs franchise model appears to be gray-ish. The collection’s value is disputed. The inventory management was apparently a disaster on multiple sides. And Ben’s tactics crossed societal, cultural, and likely legal lines.

But here’s the thing about narrative warfare: you don’t have to be factually detailed to resonate. You have to be true enough. And the story of a corporation using every legal lever available to avoid accountability for an old man’s Lego collection was compelling. Once a story like that gets momentum, the detailed corrections from a petty corporation simply cannot keep pace with a passionate YouTuber willing to flee the country in service of his Minifig mission.

How Bricks and Minifigs Lost

A leaked internal memo to all franchise locations tells the story better than I can.

The memo instructed franchises to use verbatim scripts when speaking to customers. Disable comments on social media. Pursue platform takedowns on YouTube, Patreon, and GoDaddy. Keep everything confidential to not “compromise the active legal case.”

The memo also predicted an outrage cycle lasting a few weeks before dying down.

The memo got leaked and read on camera.

Patreon CEO Jack Conte responded to the takedown notice publicly, stating that Bricks and Minifigs could, in his words, stuff it — and that if they didn’t like Ben’s page staying up, they were welcome to sue Patreon. The screenshots of disabled comments went viral within hours.

The Kaiser store is now permanently closed. The franchise owners have been cut loose. The GoFundMe exceeded $400,000.

This is what happens when you fight a narrative war with lawyers and corrupt law enforcement tactics.

The law depends on facts, timelines, and evidence. Narrative runs on emotion, identity, and story. These are separate battlefields. Bricks and Minifigs brought a legal team to an information fight.

The Point

I want to be careful here. The court of public opinion should not replace the actual court system. That’s not a healthy outcome for anyone.

But if you take one thing from this story: if a company, a government agency — or even just an individual — is facing a story that’s gaining traction, the response cannot be silence, suppression, and legal intimidation. Every institution in this story made the same mistake. They identified Ben as the threat and moved to eliminate him. They got him arrested. They pursued takedowns on every platform they could find.

He wasn’t the threat. The story was the threat. And the story exposes real problems in the legal system, in law enforcement, in how difficult it is for ordinary people to fight for themselves.

Ben crossed lines to tell this story. But without his antics, Ed Mansell gets nothing. Bricks and Minifigs move on.

Sometimes, the only leverage when you feel powerless is a compelling story in the public arena.

May the Force be with you.

-Riley

Sources

• Reckless Ben vs. Bricks & Minifigs: $200K Star Wars LEGO Collection Dispute Explained — Geeks + Gamers

• Keizer Bricks & Minifigs shut down after viral LEGO collection controversy — KEZI News

• Bricks and Minifigs closes Keizer store amid Star Wars Lego collection dispute — KOIN News

• Bricks & Minifigs vs Reckless Ben Lego drama explained: Full timeline — Dexerto

• Patreon CEO tells Bricks & Minifigs to “sue us” after refusing to remove Reckless Ben — Dexerto

• Bricks & Minifigs–Reckless Ben controversy — Wikipedia

So you might expect me to mourn the slow-motion collapse of the most successful modern myth in the world.

I’m really not.

It has everything to do with a recruiting program, an air show, and a woman in a Dallas airport who once called me a baby killer.

Miami Beach

Over Memorial Day weekend, I was in Miami as part of Altitude Live, a new Air Force Public Affairs (PA) initiative. The premise surprised me. It was not a boatload (planeload?) of “Air Force influencers” airlifted to an air show to mimic TikTok trends.

Well, there was a little of that.

But for the most part, it was a mix of actual airmen with actual jobs (an F-35 crew chief, a prior-enlisted guy who’d just earned his pilot slot, a few recruiters), handed a surprising amount of creative freedom and told, more or less, go tell a real story.

I am not a recruiter. I am not an influencer of any kind.

God no.

But I applied because of a thesis: audiences (millennials, sure, but Gen Z just as much) have grown allergic to the polished, impersonal, look-at-me #content that has dominated influencer marketing for a generation. The Air Force pitch to the next generation can’t be look how cool we are. It has to be real. (more on that in a sec)

My contribution to the weekend had little to do with the air show. My most “successful” post was when I cornered the Honor Guard and some Special Warfare operators and got them to deliver their Star Wars hot takes, then stitched it into a goofy Instagram reel.

You cannot fake and filter your way to connecting with human beings. We empathize through conflict and struggle. Filter all of that out, whether you’re cutting a recruiting ad or performing a perfect life on social media, and you are left with something over-produced and dead. People can smell it.

The woman in the airport

Early in my career, I was traveling in uniform, getting off the rental-car shuttle at DFW, when an older woman walked past me to board it, leaned in, said “baby killer,” and was gone before I could form a thought. I had no idea how to react.

It weirdly felt like a rite of passage, because I’d heard the stories. My grandfather served in Korea as a helicopter mechanic and instructor, and I’m sure he caught some of that same anti-war sentiment from the radical hippie boomers when he came home. The relationship between the military and the country is not fixed. There are rally-around-the-flag moments like the months after 9/11, and there are the Vietnam years.

That is precisely why telling the honest, human version of military life is a responsibility of Public Affairs. The polished pitch might work… But the unfiltered human story, the struggle, the cost, the actual people, is what can connect with the public, particularly at a time of public distrust and unpopular conflicts.

The same disease, in a galaxy far, far away

Which brings me to Star Wars, and to the most expensive demonstration of this principle playing out at the box office right now.

So I watched The Mandalorian and Grogu.

It was fine.

I’ll spare you the full review, but “fine” is the whole problem. A lot of people have started using “fun” as a pejorative, and they’re not entirely wrong. When fun becomes the ceiling, it usually means the goalposts have been dragged off the field of play. That’s not great storytelling. It is, unfortunately, a corporate product attempting to clear a very low bar… As the saccharin, sycophantic “influencer” class assures Disney’s Star Wars marketing machine that any trepidation from a disenfranchised fandom is/are merely online “haters” to be ignored, as the very-real movie-going public has given up on the franchise.

For contrast, let’s recall the hype of the Prequel era. Remember Revenge of the Sith — the Senate chamber is empty as Yoda confronts the newly revealed Sidious. Good and Evil are facing off, literally in the entire seat of galactic power, rising into the vast Republic Senate as Anakin betrays his wife and former master across the galaxy.

Shakespearean.

That is what mythmaking looked like when George was at the helm.

Why decline is good news

My fondest memories as a fan are not from the years Star Wars dominated the culture. The prequel kids, convinced we were crazy, certain we were the last people on earth who loved this thing, “everyone else” mocked. The Clone Wars era, when the fandom was a small, weird subculture that religiously watched this silly cartoon every week. Star Wars was out of the spotlight, and that’s where I found my place in the Star Wars community. The Forcecast, Star Wars Celebration, starting the Star Wars Report…

So when the franchise fades, when it becomes an afterthought, a “remember when…” I am not mourning. The margin is exactly where the experimental, interesting stories get made. It’s already happening. The best writing Star Wars has produced in years came from the edges: Andor, the Maul series.

This is the struggle the Air Force and Lucasfilm have in common. Self-congratulatory #content will sanitize the humanity out of anything — a recruiting spot, a disingenuous celebrity encounter, or a series of streaming episodes contorted into a film.

MTFBWY

-Riley

The views expressed here are my own and do not represent the U.S. Air Force or the Department of Defense.

• [00:00] Trump–Netanyahu call & Hezbollah strikes

• [02:30] Competing interests: Iran, Israel, and the U.S.

• [05:20] Aftermath of Operation Epic Fury

• [07:40] A ceasefire “in name only”

• [10:20] Altitude Live & Air Force storytelling

• [13:00] The Mandalorian & Grogu review

• [18:00] Star Wars’ identity crisis & prequel‑kid nostalgia

Drawing on my Air Force intelligence background, I’ll break down what “success” really means, why airpower and diplomacy both have limits, and how Iranian propaganda (and other foreign disinfo) is shaping what you see online.

Then I’ll pivot to Star Wars, arguing that Disney’s Mandalorian marketing is culturally blind, alienating legacy fans and families while leaning hard into online influencer aesthetics, and making a concrete box office prediction I’ll be revisiting.

1. [0:00] Episode Overview

2. [3:23] Did We Win? Operation Epic Fury Explained

3. [11:09] Iran’s Regime, Long-Term Strategy & Propaganda

4. [24:37] From War to Star Wars: Mandalorian Marketing

5. [30:42] Culture War Optics, Box Office Bet & Closing

Adheres to AFI 1-1, USAF Social Media Policy
Views expressed in this video are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Air Force or Department of Defense.

The Department of Defense is now the Department of War.
Open the 2026 National Defense Strategy, and that’s what you’ll see. A Memo signed by the Secretary of War.

I read the whole thing, so you don’t have to.

Some called the focus on the Western Hemisphere “isolationism.” Foreign policy wonks warned about abandoning allies and ceding global leadership.

Here’s what actually happened in the past year:

• Operation MIDNIGHT HAMMER — we struck Iran’s nuclear program

• Operation EPIC FURY — sustained combat against Iranian forces across multiple theaters

• Operation ABSOLUTE RESOLVE — direct action in Venezuela

This Document Is Different

National Defense Strategies are usually boring. Written by committee. Staffed through interagency meetings. The goal is consensus, to make sure everyone from the Department of State to NATO can sign off.

The 2022 version was exactly that. It called China a “pacing challenge.” Iran got mentioned in one section.

The 2026 version?

It calls out “grandiose nation-building.” It names previous administrations for squandering our advantages. It calls China the second most powerful country in the world and lists Iran’s Axis of Resistance by name — Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the IRGC.

What It Means for the Budget

The National Defense Strategy drives the budget. If it’s in the NDS, it gets funded.

So when this document says:

• Defend the Homeland (top priority)

• Deter China in the First Island Chain

• Allies take primary responsibility for their own regions

• Rebuild the defense industrial base

You can expect:

• Hypersonics and long-range strike systems

• Missile defense — the document calls for “Golden Dome for America.”

• Autonomous systems and AI — Anduril, Palantir, software-driven warfare

• Munitions production at scale

What gets cut? Legacy platforms. Europe-heavy force posture. Anything optimized for the old counterinsurgency fight.

Where We Actually Are

This is a strategy that says we’ll defend American interests with overwhelming force when necessary. The tone shift from 2022 to 2026 isn’t purely partisan. It’s a significant doctrinal shift in national policy. Whether you think that’s good or bad, you should at least know what the document actually says. Because most people don’t.

MTFBWY,

-Riley

Adheres to AFI 1-1, USAF Social Media Policy
Views expressed in this video are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Air Force or Department of Defense.

What the ceasefire was actually doing, from the IRGC’s operational perspective, was providing time to reload.

The views expressed here are my own and do not represent the U.S. Air Force or the Department of War.

-Riley

The IRGC Navy IS Dead… Long Live the IRGC Navy…?

Some context: The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps operates a parallel military to Iran’s regular armed forces (the Artesh) with its own naval component, ground forces, aerospace division, and intelligence. The IRGC (Navy) doctrine is area denial, chokepoint control, and swarm warfare: fast-attack craft, mines, coastal defense missiles, and one-way attack drones etc.

Operation Epic Fury degraded Iran’s conventional military infrastructure substantially, including nuclear enrichment facilities, missile production sites, naval warships, air defense networks, and more. What it could not fully neutralize was the distributed, low-signature network of IRGC fast attack craft embedded in coastal positions, tunneled facilities, and civilian-adjacent infrastructure throughout the Gulf coast.

The ceasefire gave the IRGC Navy time to reconstitute and re-establish C2 (command and control). And to coordinate swarm attacks from the remaining assets that can harass the SoH: Cruise missiles, drones, and small boats that CENTCOM’s Admiral Cooper was describing on May 4 when he told reporters: “The IRGC has launched multiple cruise missiles, drones and small boats at ships we are protecting. We have defeated each and every one of those threats through the clinical application of defensive munitions.”

“Clinical application of defensive munitions” describes a resource-intensive posture that Iran can likely sustain longer than the U.S. would want to absorb. The IRGC Navy simply needs to raise the insurance cost of transit.

In early May, the IRGC formally vowed to “forcefully stop” any vessels attempting to defy what it termed the “new order” in the Strait, a reference to the post-Khamenei government’s assertion of sovereign authority over maritime traffic in the waterway.

Why the UAE

Iran has been striking the UAE since the opening of the conflict in late February. By the time the ceasefire took effect, the UAE had intercepted over 500 ballistic missiles, more than 2,200 drone attacks, and dozens of cruise missiles. At least thirteen people were killed. Oil production dropped by as much as 800,000 barrels per day. On May 4, the same day Project Freedom launched, Iran hit the UAE again with ballistic missiles and drones, setting an oil port ablaze and sending Dubai residents into shelter.

The question “why UAE” has two answers: One structural, one ideological.

Structurally: the UAE hosts U.S. military assets and sits at the center of U.S. Gulf logistics. It has more to lose economically than Saudi Arabia and less defensive depth. This applies pressure on a U.S. partner with lower political tolerance for escalation. (granted that’s changed significantly) The Fujairah Oil Terminal targeting is especially significant: it’s the port Iran would most want degraded if it cannot fully control the strait itself, because Fujairah is how the UAE moves oil if the Strait closes, AKA it’s the back door Iran would most want to shut.

Ideologically: The UAE signed the Abraham Accords in 2020. Iran’s IRGC responded the following day by calling the decision “historic idiocy.”

lolz.

The IRGC is an ideological institution that operates a military. Its hostility towards everything the U.S. represents, towards Gulf normalization, and towards the particular model of development the UAE has chosen is fundamental.

I was in the UAE for my last deployment. The Emiratis have made a clear decision about which direction they're going. The Louvre Abu Dhabi, Formula 1, and a Disney park are on the way. Whether that reflects genuine cultural affinity with the West or a more practical read on where future prosperity is, the practical result is the same: a Gulf state that has staked its economic future on U.S. partnership, and frankly a tourism economy that requires stability to function.

The IRGC hates this. A UAE that wants Western tourists, Western investment, and Western security guarantees is a UAE that cannot afford to be neutral. And a UAE that cannot be neutral is, from the IRGC’s perspective, a target. Iran’s radical clerics and the IRGC hardliners are saying that the UAE model won’t work because they won’t let it.

We’ll see.

The views expressed here are my own and do not represent the U.S. Air Force or the Department of War.

-Riley

Apple Podcast Link

The most dangerous leader you’ll ever work for isn’t incompetent; they’re actually competent enough to advance their career while caring about all the wrong things. Mission and people become tools for personal gain.

In this episode, I break down:

• What a careerist bureaucrat actually is (and why they’re so hard to spot)

• The trap: how good people get caught optimizing for a bad leader

• When to recognize you’re in it — and when to get out

This is a case study in institutional failure. It’s also why I’m leaving active duty Air Force Intelligence.

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@rileyblanton
Contact: watchtowerintel@substack.com
Follow on X: https://x.com/therileyguy
The gram: https://instagram.com/therileyguy

Last week, I attended Jon Acuff’s Remarkable You. (Great event, highly recommend despite the cheesy name) Right before I left Nashville, I wrote down three new Soundtracks that I want to adopt:

• Average consistent effort beats amazingly inconsistent effort.

• Hills pay the bills.

• It’ll be a success or a story.

  Thanks for reading Watchtower Intel! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

I’m a “dreamer.” Always a million ideas, always waiting for the perfect moment. Waiting to know exactly what I’m doing before I start.

But here’s what I didn’t write down, because I didn’t need to. I made this decision over a year ago: Next year, I’m separating from the Active Duty Air Force, and this (whatever this is) is what comes next.

Books. YouTube. Substack. Podcasting. Speaking. Basically, the things I’ve been working on in the margins of a full-time Air Force Intel career.

The Part Where I Admit the Real Problem

Here’s what I haven’t really said publicly.

I don’t entirely know what the next chapter will look like.

I know what Watchtower Intel is supposed to be: geopolitical analysis, information warfare, America’s role in the world, the intel guy’s perspective on the events everyone else is just reacting to. That’s where I have something to offer.

But there’s also the leadership/personal development (AKA Self-Help) nerd in me. (A lot of you know me from my Full Focus videos) The lessons veterans learn the hard way: How to find your identity and leadership style within a system that doesn’t always leverage your strengths or potential.

What I Learned From Jon Acuff

It was a simple question from Jon: What hill are you willing to climb that others won’t?

The hills-pay-the-bills idea is deceptively simple. (There’s a T-Shirt) The work that’s hard enough that most people quit is the work that’s actually worth doing. The scene at the top is visible only to those who made the climb.

I think my hill is an intersection.

I know, that sounds a bit odd, but hear me out.

It’s the place where the Intel guy meets the proverbial self-help nerd.

Granted, that intersection doesn’t feel comfy. It doesn’t fit cleanly into a category. The question I genuinely don’t have the answer to yet is which thing will be the primary thing.

So Here’s What I’m Asking You

I’ve been thinking about this in private long enough. I’d like to allow myself to be honest about how almost-paralyzing this can be for the millions-of-ideas-guy.

You’ve been here — some of you since the Star Wars Report days, some from Geeky Stoics, and some from the Watchtower iteration.

And I’d like to know what you’re looking for from Riley.

Put another way: What would you genuinely miss if it disappeared? (@Geeky Stoics will continue to be my home for all things Star Wars, etc.)

MTFBWY

— Riley

There is a lot to say about the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner Saturday night. A gunman charged a security checkpoint outside the Washington Hilton ballroom, fired on federal officers, and reportedly told authorities he was targeting Trump administration officials. The President and the entire Cabinet were evacuated. A Secret Service agent took a round to the vest and, thank God, walked away. It is, by any measure, the lead story. And there are plenty of people better qualified than I to cover it.

That’s not what this piece is about.

This piece is about what happens when the people who claim to hold power accountable become intoxicated by proximity to it. And how this phenomenon is closely tied to Newt Gingrich’s Conservative revolution during the 1990s.

By 9 p.m., DC had produced, within a single mile, two moments revealing how American power actually works: a ballroom full of journalists flat on the floor while Secret Service agents sprinted down the aisles, and a gallery full of “independent” media figures sipping cocktails and settling scores at their own exclusive party.

Occasionally, an evening arrives that strips away the performance and shows you the machinery underneath, the hunger for access, and the Legacy media’s desperate cries for relevance.

The Dinner That Refuses to Die

The White House Correspondents’ Dinner has been declared dead, irrelevant, or embarrassing every few years since the Reagan administration. But it refuses to die. It survived the Seth Meyers roast/Trump origin story. It survived Trump’s first-term boycott. It survived the pandemic. And this year, the year Trump showed up as a sitting president for the first time, a gunman turned it into a crime scene.

The dinner that refuses to die is evidence of Washington’s extraordinary capacity for institutional inertia. The WHCD does not serve the public interest, nor does it strengthen press freedom, hold power accountable, or produce anything of journalistic value. It is a mechanism for the people inside it to feel important. It is the Mirror of Erised that DC politicos masquerading as journalists cannot help looking into.

Interestingly, Jim Acosta (more on him in a moment) wrote the book on the danger of anti-press rhetoric — his 2019 memoir is titled The Enemy of the People: A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth in America. He spent years arguing that overheated political rhetoric was putting journalists in physical danger.

The data tells a different story. The targets of political violence in America are not, by and large, members of the Legacy press. They are people with actual political and cultural influence. According to START at the University of Maryland, there was a 34.5% increase in total terrorism and targeted violence events in the first eight months of 2025 relative to the same period in 2024. (Princeton) The U.S. Capitol Police is on track to investigate over 14,000 possible threats against lawmakers and their offices this year, up from 9,474 in an already busy 2024. (CBS) In the first half of 2025, 35% of violent events tracked by University of Maryland researchers targeted U.S. government personnel or facilities — more than twice the rate in 2024. (PBS)

It’s a bloody roll call of the politically powerful: two assassination attempts on the President in 2024, the arson at Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s residence, the killing of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, the fatal shooting of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University. And now last night — a gunman at the correspondents’ dinner reportedly targeted administration officials. The press may believe it holds tremendous power. The people committing political violence seem to disagree when selecting their targets.

Ain’t No Party Like a Substack Party?

Across town, the Substack New Media Party was underway at the Renwick Gallery. The event is billed, as it has been for three years running, as counter-programming to the legacy media establishment dinner down the street.

The premise for the Substack Era of independent journalism has been pretty straightforward: the old media world lost the trust of the public. Substack is something different. A direct relationship between journalists and readers. Independence from advertisers. Freedom from institutional groupthink. It’s a genuinely compelling offer.

But look at who was at the Renwick Gallery last night. Kara Swisher. Mehdi Hasan. Chuck Todd. Chris Cillizza. Jennifer Rubin. Jim Acosta. Many of Substack’s top writers are largely progressive/former corporate media journalists. (Daily Wire) The platform that positioned itself as the antidote to legacy media has become its most prominent alumni association.

Evidently, the party wasn't going well. A confrontation reportedly broke out between Jim Acosta (yes, the author of The Enemy of the People) and journalist Michael Tracey, with security ultimately escorting Tracey from the venue. Tracey responded by posting the address of a nearby Hampton Inn on X and waiting outside for a fight that never came. The details are almost beside the point. The man who built his career warning about violence against journalists ended his evening having a critic thrown out of an exclusive DC party, right after an actual gunman was being tackled a mile away. The new media revolution, ladies and gentlemen.

The point is that the party exists at all. Substack, in its third year of WHCD counter-programming, has assembled a guest list that is functionally indistinguishable from the people who couldn’t get a better table at the Hilton.

When your counter-programming requires an invite list, a gallery space a few blocks from the White House, and a roster of former cable anchors, you are less the counter, and more so the program.

What Real Counter-Power Actually Looks Like

I just binged Steve Kornacki’s podcast series The Revolution. It’s based on his book The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism. (Highly worth your time.) It’s a detailed, surprisingly fair-minded account of how Newt Gingrich (and partially Rush Limbaugh) built the conservative wave of the early 1990s that became the Contract with America and the 1994 Republican Revolution.

I’ll admit the subject hits closer to home than it might for you. My dad was involved in Newt Gingrich’s early congressional campaigns. There’s a version of my life where my parents traded mission work for Washington careers, and I grew up inside the beltway rather than as a missionary’s son in Peshawar and Samarkand. (stories for another time) I’m grateful they didn’t. Growing up as a third culture kid gave me something no DC upbringing would: an actual appreciation for America.

What Kornacki’s podcast captures, and what often gets lost in nostalgic coverage of that era, is how genuinely laissez-faire the pre-Gingrich Republican minority actually was. There’s a tendency among political journalists (Kornacki himself included) to look back on the old era of bipartisanship with rose-tinted glasses. What that framing misses is that the bipartisanship of the pre-1994 Congress was a symptom. Republicans had been in the minority for forty years. They had made peace with powerlessness and called it statesmanship.

Gingrich saw it differently. He had a genuine conviction that a more principled, culturally coherent conservatism was not only possible but winnable, if you were willing to fight for it rather than manage its decline. And the instrument that made the revolution real wasn’t access to power. It was talk radio.

What Rush Limbaugh built, and what the Contract with America crystallized, was a completely new institution of political power. Talk radio had zero interest in getting a seat at the proverbial Washington powerbrokers table. The new conservatives didn’t want access to the establishment. They were determined to reach the people the establishment had written off/didn’t even know existed: the evangelical right, the truck driver who had never been invited to the country club cocktail party. The Contract with America was a masterclass in communicating a political and cultural message in a way that actually resonated. Outsiders running on a coherent agenda, speaking a language their audience understood, distributed through a medium that Washington hadn’t yet figured out how to co-opt.

Then came the Drudge Report, and the Clinton coverage that broke through every institutional firewall the legacy press had erected. None of these people were angling for WHCD invites. Regardless of your political persuasion, this was real cultural impact through media disruption.

So What

Every institution of power has a gravitational pull. Get close enough to it, and it will start to reshape you: your instincts, your values. This is not a moral failing unique to journalists or media executives. It is how institutions work. They absorb challengers. They reward those who go along with the status quo.

I’m aware, by the way, of a certain irony in publishing this critique on Substack. The platform has been genuinely useful for building Watchtower Intel and supports some incredible independent journalists. But the question worth asking, for anyone invested in the future of the country (at least speaking for myself), is the one Gingrich and Limbaugh answered in The Revolution of the 1990s, and the Renwick Gallery crowd seems to get wrong:

Are you building a new movement? Or are you just trying to throw a better party?

-Riley

We covered:

• Why the “indefinite ceasefire” shows how the IRGC has consolidated power

• The strategic difference between operational success (obliterating Iran’s conventional military) and impossible problems (securing nuclear material without boots on the ground)

• Why flippant commentary about “just solving it” ignores the actual cost in American lives

• The moral question nobody’s asking: How is a radical Islamist theocratic regime with nuclear weapons different than North Korea, Russia, or China?

Scott gets it; he’s rightly skeptical of the hot-take industrial complex and wants to understand what’s actually happening, not telling his audience what to think about it.

(This is why Watchtower Intel exists: to bridge the gap between how military operations are planned and executed, and the circus happening in the commentary class.)

-Riley

The USS Spruance (DDG-111) put three 5-inch rounds into the engine room of the Iranian-flagged M/V Touska after a six-hour standoff. Marines from the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit helocast from the USS Tripoli (LHA 7), rappelled onto the deck in the dark, and took the vessel. CENTCOM released the video. It’s everywhere.

What actually happened

On 19 April, the Touska was transiting toward Bandar Abbas at roughly 17 knots, in violation of the U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports that has been in effect since ceasefire negotiations stalled in Islamabad on 11 April. The Spruance issued multiple hails across a six-hour window. The crew did not comply. The Spruance then fired on the engine room, and after the vessel went dead in the water, Visit, Board, Search, and Seizure (VBSS) teams from the 31st MEU helicoptered in from the Tripoli. The vessel is now in U.S. custody.

But the video is an artifact. It shows what happened. It does not show why this matters. The pieces on the chessboard are moving.

The UNO-Reverse Blockade

There are now two formal blockades operating near the same choke point. The United States is blockading Iranian ports from the sea. Iran, having reclosed the Strait of Hormuz on 18 April, is blocking-by-threat U.S. friendly ships that would transit through it. These are both pressure instruments operating simultaneously in the same body of water.

The question that determines what happens next is which side runs out of leverage first.

Iran cannot sustain a reciprocal Hormuz closure without cutting off its own oil revenue, because the tankers the U.S. is turning back are the ones that carry its product. A closed SoH is a self-inflicted wound at a time when Tehran has already absorbed 38 days of Operation Epic Fury. Its industrial base is degraded. Its navy is effectively gone. Its nuclear program has been reduced to what CSIS, with careful word choice, calls “remnants.”

The United States, meanwhile, cannot sustain a blockade in the Gulf of Oman indefinitely without addressing a much more significant variable than Iran.

That variable is Beijing.

Why this is a China story

Roughly 90 percent of Iran’s crude oil exports go to the People’s Republic of China. The two countries signed a 25-year, $400 billion strategic partnership in 2021 precisely to insulate that trade from Western pressure. Chinese “teapot” refineries in Shandong Province have been quietly absorbing Iranian crude at discounted rates for years. When the White House announced a secondary Operation Economic Fury on 16 April to obstruct Iranian revenue streams, the targets were not in Tehran. They were in Beijing.

A U.S. naval blockade that gates Iranian oil exports is, by definition, a U.S. naval blockade that gates Chinese oil imports. For a country whose economic model is built on energy-hungry manufacturing at scale, having a major pillar of your crude supply metered through the application of a 5-inch gun on an American destroyer is a massive strategic problem. I bet you dollars to donuts that Beijing is looking at the Hormuz status board this week, worried about what it means to live in a world where the United States is willing to treat Chinese-bound oil as discretionary.

Russia is a regional spoiler tied down by a land war in its near abroad. Europe is hedging. India is hedging. No other state has the strategic weight, the nuclear arsenal, the economic leverage, and the cyber capabilities to match the United States across the full spectrum of national power. Beijing is the only remaining world power that functions as a direct peer competitor. Every other player is a proxy.

The question worth watching this week is not whether Iran retaliates, but whether, and how, the PRC signals its tolerance for a status quo in which its energy imports are conditional on U.S. permission.

But Wait, There’s More (Nukes)

The same 24-hour window of the Touska seizure also saw an unusual volume of activity over the U.S. High Frequency Global Communications System that carries Emergency Action Messages to and from the national command authority. Open-source monitors logged nearly 100 EAMs, with an E-6B Mercury airborne over the Atlantic still broadcasting every 30 minutes as of this writing.

What this appears to be, based on historical patterns that OSINT monitors have mapped for years, is a recurring STRATCOM nuclear command-and-control exercise window.

But this is where it gets interesting.

What NC3 is, and why it matters

Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications (NC3) is the connective tissue between the national command authority (the president) and the nuclear forces that would execute his orders. It is the system by which a decision made in one room is transmitted, authenticated, and acted upon by crews standing alert in missile fields, submarines, and bombers around the world. It is designed to function under every condition.

HFGCS is one of the physical layers of that system. The E-6B Mercury is another — an airborne command post built to survive the loss of ground-based infrastructure, capable of communicating with the submarine fleet via very low frequency, and capable of relaying launch orders if the chain of command required it.

Deterrence is a claim that a nuclear adversary understands. Any attempt to disable U.S. command and control will fail. You cannot defend that claim with a white paper. You defend it by demonstration. Repeatedly and visibly. In a way that the adversary’s intelligence services can observe, measure, and brief to their own leadership.

This is why the top of the escalation ladder has to be demonstrated even when nobody realistically plans to climb it. Its credibility is the foundation underneath every lower-order U.S. action, including the 5-inch gun that put a hole in the Touska.

If the scenario that actually matters (a major conflict with a peer competitor, which at this moment means the PRC) ever arrived, the NC3 system cannot be compromised.

The two stories are the same story

One story is the deliberate application of pressure at a choke point, making the U.S. a default meter of China’s energy supply. The other is a demonstration that the apex of American command and control is capable and credible.

Both are messages to the same audience.

The views expressed here are my own and do not represent the U.S. Air Force or the Department of Defense/War. This analysis draws exclusively on open-source reporting and publicly available think tank analysis. No classified information is referenced, implied, or derived from.

Sources & References

Hormuz standoff / M/V Touska seizure

• “U.S. Seizes Iranian-Flagged Cargo Ship Violating Blockade” — The Aviationist, 20 April 2026 — https://theaviationist.com/2026/04/20/us-seizes-iranian-mv-touska/

• “Marines seize Iranian cargo ship, Trump says” — Task & Purpose, 19 April 2026 — https://taskandpurpose.com/news/marines-seize-cargo-ship-iran/

• “Iran cargo ship seized by US could become ‘spoils of war’” — CNN, 20 April 2026 — https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/20/middleeast/iran-cargo-ship-seized-explainer-intl-hnk-ml

• “U.S. struck, seized Iranian-flagged ship Touska in Gulf of Oman” — CNBC, 19 April 2026 — https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/19/trump-navy-iran-ship-gulf-of-oman.html

• “Iran says it has closed the Strait of Hormuz again” — NPR, 18 April 2026 — https://www.npr.org/2026/04/18/nx-s1-5789780/iran-middle-east-updates

• “Iran war updates: Tehran vows response after Trump says US seized ship” — Al Jazeera, 19 April 2026 — https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2026/4/19/iran-war-live-tehran-says-no-date-set-for-us-talks-hormuz-strait-closed

• “Naval blockade of Iran” — Wikipedia (background reference) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_blockade_of_Iran

Operation Epic Fury & the China–Iran pivot

• “Operation Epic Fury and the Remnants of Iran’s Nuclear Program” — CSIS — https://www.csis.org/analysis/operation-epic-fury-and-remnants-irans-nuclear-program

• “Epic Fury: The Campaign Against Iran’s Missile & Nuclear Infrastructure” — CSIS — https://www.csis.org/analysis/epic-fury-campaign-against-irans-missile-nuclear-infrastructure

• “The Long Tail of Operation Epic Fury: Structural Disorder After the Guns Fall Silent” — Manara Magazine, April 2026 — https://manaramagazine.org/2026/04/epic-fury-structural-disorder/

• “U.S. launches ‘Operation Economic Fury’ to obstruct Iran’s revenue streams amid blockade” — DefenseScoop, 16 April 2026 — https://defensescoop.com/2026/04/16/trump-economic-pressure-iran-blockade/

• “Epic Fury Update — April 19, 2026” — SOF News — https://sof.news/middle-east/epic-fury-19april2026/

NC3, HFGCS, and the SKYMASTER exercise cycle

• “The Nuclear Exercise Happening Right Now That Nobody’s Talking About” — NEET INTEL (Substack)

NEET INTEL

The Nuclear Exercise Happening Right Now That Nobody's Talking About

Read more

5 months ago · 4 likes · NEET INTEL

• “STRATCOM Kicks Off Global Thunder 26 Nuclear Command & Control Exercise” — The Aviationist — https://theaviationist.com/2025/10/21/global-thunder-26/

• “HFGCS (High Frequency Global Communications System)” — Signal Identification Wiki — https://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/HFGCS_(High_Frequency_Global_Communications_System)

• “Emergency Action Message” — Wikipedia (background reference) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Action_Message

• “Radio Apocalypse: HFGCS, The Backup Plan For Doomsday” — Hackaday — https://hackaday.com/2024/08/05/radio-apocalypse-hfgcs-the-backup-plan-for-doomsday/

Last night, President Trump posted a lengthy critique of Pope Leo XIV on Truth Social, calling the first American-born pontiff “WEAK on Crime” and “terrible for Foreign Policy,” accusing him of catering to the radical left, and suggesting the Church only elected an American pope to manage the Trump presidency. Minutes later, he shared an AI-generated image depicting himself performing a miraculous healing, glowing hand extended over a bedridden man, an American flag, and eagles visible in the sky behind him.

Understanding the substance of the President’s frustration with the Pope requires some intellectual (and theological) curiosity. Pope Leo has publicly and repeatedly criticized the U.S.-Israel campaign against Iran, insisting that “Jesus is the king of peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war.”

The real story here is the varied reactions to the Truth Social posts. And to understand it, you have to read it not through the lens of culture war politics, but through the lens of signal. What do these posts transmit, to which audiences, and what does each audience do with it?

The Domestic Coalition Signal

For the MAGA base, the posts read as strength. The Pope positioned himself as a moral critic of U.S. military action; the President responded directly and publicly with irreverence and disdain for the Pontiff's remarks.

But that’s not the only audience inside the MAGA coalition, and the responses from within it were striking. Michael Knowles, one of the most prominently MAGA-aligned Catholic commentators in media, posted publicly that “it behooves the President both spiritually and politically to delete the picture, no matter the intent.” That drew 1.4 million views. He also reposted a detailed theological response explaining the Catholic doctrine of Papal Infallibility — specifically, the distinction between the Pope’s ex cathedra teaching authority (binding on the faithful) and his personal, non-authoritative opinions on temporal matters like war and foreign policy, which carry no doctrinal obligation. This POV gives MAGA Catholics a framework for rejecting the Pope’s politics without questioning the Church.

Riley Gaines, a conservative activist/collegiate swimmer, speaking from a broadly evangelical-adjacent POV, was direct: “a little humility would serve him well. God shall not be mocked.” She’s citing Galatians 6:7. Marjorie Taylor Greene, herself a former Trump ally, noted that the post went up “on Orthodox Easter” and that the pope “is rightly against Trump’s war in Iran.”

What is notable across all of these responses is what is absent: very few prominent conservative voices defended the image.

The Institutional Signal

The Western political tradition has challenged the idea of leaders who present themselves as more than men and begin to borrow the aura of the divine.

Meaning, the idea of limited government, the separation of spiritual and temporal authority, and the concept of a ruler accountable to something beyond himself are foundational to the political tradition going back to the conflict at Canossa in 1077 between Pope Gregory VII and Emperor Henry IV. These are the ideas that produced the American Republic.

The fact that the pushback from Knowles, Gaines, and others came publicly and on principle, from people who broadly support Trump, is not evidence of coalition collapse. It’s evidence of a cultural and political debate functioning as it should.

The Geopolitical Signal

This is where precision matters most, and where I want to be most careful.

The United States just concluded (For now) 38 days of major combat operations against a regime whose foundational governing principle is the fusion of divine authority and political power. The Islamic Republic of Iran does not merely claim political legitimacy; it claims theological legitimacy.

This piece is not drawing a moral equivalence between the administration and the Iranian theocracy. That comparison is both unfair and imprecise. (That won’t stop some pundits) To state what should be painfully obvious… The American Constitutional Republic and Iranian velayat-e faqih (Shia Islamic political doctrine) are not the same thing.

But the signal is about what a message does once it leaves the sender’s hands. Context matters. Secretary Hegseth invoked scripture when framing the Iran campaign. Pope Leo’s counter was a response to that framing. The AI image, posted in that context, does not exist in a vacuum. It lands in an information environment where adversaries are actively scanning for material that undercuts U.S. legitimacy and standing in the region.

The Throughline

The clash with the Vatican is not primarily a religious story. It is a stress test on a coalition that was held together, in significant part, by shared political opposition. The Iran war has been a clear fissure, a conflict where some coalition members have sincere reservations about the scope, cost, and objective. The AI image is another fissure.

From the Watchtower,

-Riley

Sources: Axios | Variety | Washington Post | Time | CNN | NPR | Daily Caller | The Daily Beast | Michael Knowles / X